Tipping the Iceberg - Leveraging a food system transformation for Arctic Indigenous communities

Abstract

Humanity is increasingly operating outside safe planetary boundaries, giving rise to interlinked sustainability challenges in climate, biodiversity, food security, and inequality. There is growing recognition among sustainability scientists that current efforts targeting these challenges fail to address their root causes and that understanding systems holistically is urgently needed to enable effective sustainability transformations. Arctic Indigenous food systems exemplify the interconnectedness of these challenges, as they disrupt both social and ecological aspects of these highly interlinked systems and lead to high rates of food insecurity for the communities that depend on them as a result. While historically, Indigenous knowledge was often marginalized in research, recent transdisciplinary research efforts emphasize equitable knowledge co-creation and the integration of plural knowledge systems to address these complex sustainability issues. Being focused on relationships and interconnectivity in systems, complex systems science aligns closely with Indigenous worldviews and offers valuable tools for navigating transformative change. St. Paul Island is one of the five Pribilof Islands located between the United States of America and Russia and north of the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea. The Aleut Community of St. Paul Island depends on a mixed food system that combines traditional subsistence practices and food sharing with the Aleut Community Store and online food orders. The Indigenous community faces several complex sustainability challenges in their food system, leading to high levels of food insecurity for them. The overarching aim of the research presented in this thesis is to leverage a sustainability transformation in the Arctic Indigenous food system on St. Paul Island in Alaska, USA. To reach this aim, this thesis explores transdisciplinary research and complexity science approaches as tools to support transformative change in social-ecological systems.